Artistic Exploration of BioRobotics and Sequencing

Alex May gave Artistic Exploration of BioRobotics and Sequencing at the SynBio and Art conference at Warwick University on 30 January 2019. The talk brought together several strands of the practice, moving across art-science collaboration, robot art projects, Flow State, Sequence Music, and Algorithmic Photography to show how technical systems can become material for reflection rather than illustration.

What linked those projects was not a single medium but a shared interest in how biological, robotic, and computational processes are translated into forms that can be seen, heard, or experienced publicly. Sequencing and robotics were presented not as specialist background topics but as ways of asking how technology shapes perception, attention, and interpretation.

Within May’s wider practice, the talk clarified how image-making, sound, code, and machine behaviour can all be used to think through the same larger questions. Scientific procedures become visible structures, and technical research becomes a site for artistic enquiry about memory, observation, and what systems reveal or conceal.